Reserved Instance Planner Report

The Reserved Instance Planner Report shows you how you can reduce your AWS bill through Reserved Instances, which provide a significant discount compared with on-demand pricing. Based on your Amazon EC2 instance uptime, the report recommends EC2 Reserved Instance purchases for each combination of operating system, instance type, tenancy and region and shows you the projected savings for each purchase.

Planning your Reserved Instance purchases

It's critical to plan your Reserved Instance purchases carefully, so that you purchase the right type and size of RI. To that end, we recommend the following:

run the Reserved Instance Planner report a few days before end of the month

discuss the report's recommendations with the owners of the target instances, to ensure that each RI is a good fit

purchase the recommended RI on the first day of a month, to ensure that they will always expire at the end of a month

The Reserved Instance Planner is just one feature of vCommander cloud expense management for AWS. See Cost Optimization to learn about other features that work together to reduce your AWS bill.

Report settings

Access through:

Reports menu > Chargeback & IT Costing > Reserved Instance Planner

Available to:

All Access Rights Levels

Report Period: Select a report period of 7, 30, 60 or 90 days. The period ends at midnight on the day before the report is run (in contrast to other vCommander reports).

Purchase Model: Select one of the following purchase models:

All Upfront: Pay for the entire reservation term in one upfront payment. Offers the highest savings rate.

Partial Upfront: Pay for part of the reservation term in an upfront payment, then pay the remainder in monthly installments. Costs more than All Upfront, but less than No Upfront.

No Upfront: Pay for the reservation in monthly installments throughout the term's duration. Offers the lowest savings rate.

Include Detailed Data: Select Yes if you want the report to include tables that show the detailed calculations used for each combination of operating system, instance type and region.

Limit Spending To: When you enter a value in this field, the report will cap the spending at the specified limit. This option is useful if you already know the amount you can spend on Reserved Instances. A zero in this field means that there is no spending limit, and all purchases are included in the report, regardless of cost.

Required Savings %: By default, vCommander must determine that a Reserved Instance purchase will save you at least 20% over the on-demand cost in order to recommend a purchase. Enter a different percentage if desired.

Sort Purchases By: By default, the recommended purchases are sorted by Projected Savings. You can also choose to sort by Purchase Cost or Savings Percentage.

Comment: Add a comment if desired. Comments are helpful for distinguishing reports of the same type in the list of generated reports.

Add Advanced Filters: You can filter the report by one or more specific AWS accounts.

Understanding the report

The On-Demand Annual Costs are based on the cost model configured for the AWS account. A few examples:

If four instances were running for the entire reporting period, the On-Demand Annual Cost is:

annual VM cost * 100% * 4

If four instances were running for half of the reporting period, the on-demand cost is:

annual VM cost * 50% * 4

If two instances were running for half of the reporting period, and two VMs running for the entire reporting period, the on-demand cost is:

(annual VM cost * 50% * 2) + (annual VM cost * 100% * 2)

The Reserved Instance Annual Costs are based on a one-year term with the selected Purchase Model (All Upfront, Partial Upfront or No Upfront).

In the optional details tables in the lower part of the report, the Running Instance Count is the number of running instances of each combination of instance type, OS and region. The Running Instance Count Frequency (%) is the percentage of time that at least this number of instances were running.

The Reserved Instances Applied column in the detailed tables (shown in the third and fourth images below) indicates whether RIs have already been applied to this instance.

Example Reserved Instance Planner report

The Recommended Reserved Instance Purchases table below contains two rows: one for the us-east-1 region, with a recommendation to purchase four RIs, and one for the ap-northeast-1 region, with a recommendation to purchase three RIs.

The following table (which appears only if you enable the report option Include Detailed Data) provides data for the recommendation for us-east-1. It shows that four m1.small instances with the Linux OS were running 98% of the reporting period. The four RI purchases are estimated to save 35% off the on-demand annual cost.

The following table provides data for the recommendation for ap-northeast-1. It shows that a total of four m1.small instances with the Linux (Amazon VPC) OS were running over the reporting period. Two instances were running 98% of the period, three instances were running 49% of the period, and all four instances were running 49% of the period. Purchasing two RIs is estimated to save 38% off the on-demand annual cost, while purchasing three RIs is estimated to save 25% off the on-demand annual cost. Purchasing four RIs is not recommended, because the 17% savings doesn't meet the Required Savings % threshold of 20% that we set when generating the report.